I find it difficult sometimes to determine whether imperfections, of sound or focus, for instance, which seriously disturb my reading of the films, are the product of shoe-string resources, of self-conscious strategies, or of a laid-back, improvisatory attitude that accepted everything, on principle.

She certainly left loose ends; voice-over comments of all sorts hang in the air. The deterioration of colour in the film is a fact of life, and of passing time, that she would of course have accepted. The significance of words is so often loaded that we must assume deliberate editing always. Choice of songs is important - 'If I had a talking picture of you' and 'Sentimental Journey' - as is the age of the recordings. In an illegibly crackly (First World War?) song on the soundtrack of Real Time, the only audible words are 'a song that will linger forever in our ears'.

It's the same with spoken words. They don't always declare their intention. Some voices just fade out of earshot in mid-sentence. Starting instructions and clapper-board sequences are often left in, as is cursing when something has gone wrong. In one road sequence we hear 'Do you want to time this? Have you got a watch?' 'No I haven't'. Improvisations are accepted, for better or worse. In Real Time, the two young nieces argue about the word analogy until one of them insists 'an analogy is a thing, where things are not the same, but it's more or less like the thing, but in a different time'. Anne accepted it, of course. In Living Memory, during the incoherence of the walk across fields - where scripted words mingle with impromptu talk of the film-making crew - someone mocks Anne: 'You're not going to have one of those awful home-movies where sound and image don't match, are you?' 'Yes', she answers, 'just like that.' 'You always did hang out with the young', a voice-off comes back.

Self-mockery was one of Anne's life strategies, and there's a good deal in the informality of the making. You glimpse it in the titles and credits. She had a gift for the pun and the rebus, and a child-like appetite for the ridiculous. The inane camera movements in a 3-minute short of 1983, Macbeth a Tradgedy [sic] are reminiscent of the Goons' obsession with the inconsequential, and in other places there are echoes of Richard Lester's short film Running Jumping & Standing Still (1960). Her taste for punning epigrams, visual and verbal, also reflects her attachment to Victoriana. She collected tricks, toys, puzzles, illusions and gadgets. Another late short, Welcome (1983) is full of them, celebrating her great-grandfather's equating of 'amusement and science'.